Five days before the 2016 election I proposed to Eliza Borné, my editor at the Oxford American, that in 2016 we, as a nation, had experienced a long-delayed realization of the 1967 Summer of Love, a spiritual awakening made possible through the struggle for racial justice. Whereas in the post 2016 election analysis, some insisted racial politics needed to […]

In Summer 2013, I came across a boy waving down passing cars for help along a remote country road in South Texas. He had no way of knowing it, but the boy was stranded in the middle of Brooks County, a large swath of ranch land that has become a cemetery for lost migrants. I picked […]

This one was special. It was a story in which living it was as necessary as writing it. Searching for La Perdida appeared in the Oxford American’s Texas Music issue. The piece is about finding home by following the music born from our South Texas land. We travel slowly off the ranch and out of the […]